West Anhui University is a university on an island. Its campus occupies Moon Island in the Pi River at Lu’an, a city at the edge of the Dabie Mountains, in a setting the school describes as the most beautiful island university. The island campus of 1,765 mu, about 118 hectares, suits a school that began in 1918 as a provincial agricultural college and now builds its academic reputation on herbs.
The university, founded in 1918 by Zhu Yunshan, passed through decades as an agricultural and normal college before taking its present shape as a public undergraduate university with master’s-degree rights in two fields, electronic information and Chinese pharmacology. Some 20,000 undergraduates study across 66 programs, two of them rated national first-class, in fifteen colleges.
Traditional medicine is the flagship: Chinese pharmacology ranks as a provincial first-class TCM discipline, and research centers cluster around the region’s medicinal plants, including the Dabie Mountain TCM research institute and a collaborative innovation center for the development of dendrobium, the prized orchid-like herb of the mountains. A key laboratory for Dabie Mountain bioresources and a national experiment station for Chinese medicinal materials round out a field of 52 research platforms.
Its science record includes two national science second prizes and 61 provincial-and-ministerial awards, built on 52 national projects and more than 600 provincial ones. The school has earned recognition for its applied focus, including a national-level innovation space and an industry-education base co-built with industry under a ministry program.
A faculty of nearly 1,300, more than a thousand of them full-time teachers, links the school to partners in over 20 countries, with 28 international students on campus and a base for overseas talent and Chinese-language education. The university’s five national first-class courses and 99 provincial courses carry its teaching reputation.
For a century West Anhui University has been turning the resources of one region into the knowledge of a generation: the agricultural school of 1918 is now an island campus that studies the herbs and ecosystems of the Dabie Mountains, island-bound but hardly isolated.
Data Source: WXC Official Website (as of 2026)
